HPE ProLiant DL vs. VMware vSAN

It is a robust and reliable machine and can be used in different scenarios. If you have a requirement for a high end physical server to host your organizations different online services then you can use ProLiant DL. It can also be used in an environment where there is a need to host multiple different virtual machines on two or more physical servers.

Incentivized

vSAN is well suited for any application that can run in Virtual Environment. vSAN serves better for VDI, NSX, and vSphere on Cloud solutions. vSAN is a good fit for small and medium business companies. vSAN can't be a good solution where you have Oracle Solaris or IBM power systems. vSAN can't provide storage space using FCP protocol.

Incentivized

• Remote management is excellent. The newest iLO software is really good and has more than enough options to satisfy most datacenter needs.
• Uptime! These machines just keep trucking and don't need much care and feeding, even with mechanical drives where they're used.
• Centralized management is a breeze.
• Provisioning has been good for some time and has gotten even better recently.
• Security is good and very rarely are the units in need of an urgent security update.

Incentivized

• VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
• Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
• Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
• Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.

Incentivized

• With upgrades to newer versions of VMware, HP has not provided VMware images with loaded drivers, this could be an issue for future upgrades to VMware users on HPs. The support forums discuss this and we wonder why no images are available.
• Lilo support can be limited. These servers were preconfigured for us. HP was not able to help with this, telling us it must be in the preconfigured setup.
• The base server did not meet our needs and the price ramped up quickly with add-ons to utilize SAN.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have fabric-based storage acceptance to disaggregate storage and expand beyond the node concept. The assumption that increased storage needs require increased compute or ram is simply not true.
• The licensing costs are high but you do get what you pay for.

Incentivized

Usability is generally good. I mostly like to use the management interface on HPE servers. GUI is well placed and provides easy access to management and reporting. Firmware upgrade is usually smooth, drivers install correctly and provide good quality of service. We have enough ports and interfaces to connect to the servers and some room to upgrade.

Incentivized

Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with vSphere. The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.

Incentivized

In over a decade, not once had we had a bad call with HPE support, not only were they have extremely qualified engineers but the speed in answering and addressing users is bar none. The same can not be said about support from other competitors in our experience over the years.

Incentivized

Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).

Incentivized

I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.

Incentivized

VMWare stand out compared to all the products. However, it is worthwhile mentioning the following products can be used to achive similar results. Hitachi Virtual Storage Systems Nutanix Cloud Infrastrucure. In case if we are using Nuatinux at the Hypervisor level then it would be recommended to use their very own product for storage virtulization even though the vendors say that all their products are cross platform supportable. However, during tests we have found high performance when using same products accross virtualization.

Incentivized

• They last forever. We only replace them when newer versions of VMWare don't support our oldest models. Our refresh cycle on virtual hosts is 6 or 7 years.
• Plenty of third-party service support available when the warranty is up. This helps extend the life cycle as well.

Incentivized

• The ROI for VMware vSAN seems very positive. We have yet to need to upgrade since we put it in a few years ago, but without the heavy cost of dedicated storage, we have already seen reduced hardware maintenance costs and reduced management time spent.
• With the cost of dedicated storage and its separate maintenance costs, all this is rolled back into the hosts. The hosts cost more with drives in them, but not near as much as the separate dedicated storage did.
• Before VMware vSAN, you had hosts and storage devices aging out, running out of capacity, or underperforming. With vSAN you only have to worry about the hosts.

Incentivized